


Lady of Zanarkand

by Eida



Category: Final Fantasy X
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-10
Updated: 2011-01-10
Packaged: 2017-10-14 15:51:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/150927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eida/pseuds/Eida
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's cold in Zanarkand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lady of Zanarkand

It's cold in Zanarkand.

Yunalesca remembers this, though “hot” and “cold” have become nothing more than memories to her.

It isn't just that she is long-dead. The pyreflies that form the bodies of the Unsent can be just as sensitive as flesh. They are shaped by the mind that holds them together.

As centuries passed, Yunalesca has chosen to let herself become numb. It has been a long time since she's felt cold, or pain, or regret.

*

It was not always so cold. Once Zanarkand glowed, a brilliant light at the tip of the continent, rivaling the sun itself in its glory.

The sun set each evening. Zanarkand never slept.

There were always people walking the streets, heading to and from houses and shops and bars and meetings and blitzball games. Even so far north, the city was kept warm by machina, magic, and the sheer number of people who lived there.

It's child's play for Yunalesca to summon up a cloud of pyreflies and craft beautiful illusions of what once was and will never be again.

She used to get caught up in such things, back when the pain of her losses was still fresh. She would lose track of time, recreating a room in exquisite detail, or remaking a neon-lit street, or sculpting people whose names had been forgotten by the rest of Spira.

Once—only once—she made a facsimile of her late husband, Zaon.

She no longer feels the need to find refuge in illusion. All she has, or needs, is her duty.

*

Her father, Yu Yevon, had been more powerful than Yunalesca even when he was alive.

When he laid out his plan—to preserve the memory of Zanarkand, and to punish Bevelle for destroying it—Yunalesca had quietly agreed to do whatever he felt was necessary.

What was necessary, Yevon said, was the sacrifice of both Yunalesca and her husband, Lord Zaon.

When the time came, Zaon willingly let his soul be cast in stone as a fayth, so that Yunalesca could show the people of Spira how the monster Yu Yevon had created might be defeated for a time. Yunalesca died as her connection with Zaon's aeon was broken, yet she remained on Spira, just as her father planned. She had work to do.

Zaon's part in the plan came and went, and Yunalesca was left behind, to bind the people of Spira with doctrines and promises that, one day, they would no longer be plagued by Sin.

She did not allow herself to grieve until the work was done, when she retired to the ruins of her old home to await the string of sacrifices to come.

*

Back when Yunalesca still felt lonely enough to create facsimiles of people from the ambient pyreflies, she generally chose people she remembered only vaguely. It hurt less when she let the illusion dissipate.

Once she'd been tempted to try creating an image of her father. She'd decided against it. Her father still... well, he did not live, precisely. He continued to exist in Spira, albeit in a mutated form.

Yunalesca did not like to think of her father as a misshapen, scaly beast that existed only to punish the world for Zanarkand's destruction. To create a false Yevon, one who appeared as her father had during his glory years, would only make his current state seem all the worse.

Still, in a moment of idle loneliness, Yunalesca once summoned up an image of her husband Zaon.

She made him look just as he had on their wedding night. It had been a marriage of politics, not love, but even if there had never been any wild passion between them, they had nonetheless managed to find some measure of happiness in each others' companionship.

The Zaon-who-was-not-Zaon had looked at Yunalesca, smiling.

Then he froze, still as a painting on the wall, as Yunalesca realized that she did not know what happened next.

She remembered what he had worn, more or less. She still had a number of spheres of him. That night, she had wanted to relive some of her happier memories with him in a more direct form.

But she could not remember what he'd said to her, that night, or what she had said to him.

It had been more than a century since that day, after all.

Heartsick, Yunalesca had dismissed the pyreflies, and they floated away, wailing.

She never tried to create an illusion of a loved one again.

*

“Choose,” she said, looking the latest summoner in the eye. He was a young man, tall and in the full strength of his youth. “Which of your guardians shall be your fayth?”

A young woman clutched his arm, begged him to let it be her, to let her be his strength, so that they could be together until the end.

The other guardian, an older man, objected. The summoner smiled at him and shook his head sadly, thanking him for all that he'd done, and asked Yunalesca to perform the old ritual on his beloved.

The Hymn of the Fayth rose from Zanarkand Dome, and the summoner smiled through his tears.

“It will be worth it,” he promised, one hand on the unfeeling form of the fayth. “All of it. It will all be worth it in the end.”

Yunalesca did not contradict him.

Whether it was “worth it” to him or not was immaterial. She knew her duty. A charge was given to her by her father, and she would carry it out until the end of Spira itself.

Once upon a time, she might have seen something of herself in the summoner who then, head held high, set off to battle Sin.

She felt nothing beyond a vague sense of satisfaction as she watched him go with his remaining guardian, both men full of resolve and ready to face down Sin itself.

They failed. The fayth of his Final Aeon went dead, but Yunalesca saw no great cloud of pyreflies rise from the direction of the Calm Lands.

She waited patiently for the next summoner to arrive.

*

After a thousand years of summoners, fayth, sacrifices, Calms and Sin, a new thing happens.

A summoner refuses to name a guardian to serve as her fayth. In one fell swoop, she throws away the doctrines that have ruled her life so far, the doctrines that Yunalesca herself established at Yu Yevon's behest.

For the first time in centuries, Yunalesca feels the flickering of emotion.

She feels anger. She feels pity. She feels an odd pleasure at the novelty of it.

Then, like her father before her, she summons up the power of the pyreflies and the death that pervades the ruins of Zanarkand, and she makes of herself a monster.

She lashes out, her old-new rage ugly and hot and delicious, burning like hot lead in her throat. The summoner and her guardians are infidels who dared step outside of the patterns Yevon and Yunalesca had woven, patterns that had destroyed countless lives, including her husband's and her own.

As the fight goes on, her attacks grow more vicious, her shape less like an Unsent and more like a fiend. If she were more lucid, she might come to the realization that over her millennium here she has slowly come to embrace the deaths she causes, much like the fiends that roam Spira delight in tearing apart the living and, in doing so, creating more fiends to share in their anger and hatred.

But she is not thinking clearly, any more.

All she wants right now is to make an end to the summoner and her guardians—a quick, clean end, and then they would be gone, and with them would go the threat they posed to the eternal cycle that Yunalesca had given everything to maintain.

She flings death at them with all of her power.

They tear her apart with spells, steel, and aeons.

*

She thinks she hears a voice as she fades away.

“It's all right,” says the voice. “I am willing to do what it takes to preserve our city, even if it's as nothing more than a dream. My life is a small price to pay.”

It is Zaon. That's what he said to Yunalesca the day she told him of Yu Yevon's plan.

“I...” the Yunalesca-of-the-present starts to say to the Zaon-of-the-past, but even if she could find words, in a few moments she becomes unable to speak at all.

A few moments after that, she forgets pain, and loneliness, and regret, and cold altogether.


End file.
